Queen Snoozes, Smiles as Portraits Unite Freud, Warhol

"Queen Elizabeth II" by Lucian Freud. The artist painted the Queen from life, in sittings at St. James Palace. Source: National Portrait Gallery via Bloomberg

May 17 (Bloomberg) -- Andy Warhol famously predicted that
everybody would enjoy 15 minutes of fame in the modern age.

One of his subjects has had much, much more than that.

Elizabeth II has been a world-wide celebrity since her
coronation 60 years ago. Consequently, the new exhibition “The
Queen: Art and Image” at the National Portrait Gallery in
London (today through Oct. 17) is a demonstration of how many
different ways one woman can be depicted.

She has been portrayed by great artists -- Gerhard Richter,
Lucian Freud, Warhol himself -- and by others, frankly, far from
great. Her image has been treated as an archaic symbol of
royalty in a tradition that goes back to the days of
Charlemagne, and she’s been on the cover of a Sex Pistols punk
single.

After a while, you start to wonder how much any of these
pictures tell us about the human being who is their subject.

Some artists have evidently had the same idea. In Richter’s
lithograph of 1966, her image, based on a photograph, is hazily
blurred -- suggesting a hidden, unknown individual behind the
public persona.

The Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto made a photographic
study of her waxwork mannequin at Madame Tussaud’s -- you might
say he made a picture of her image, except the waxwork looks
decidedly weary.

Many of these portraits are more about monarchy than the
woman, Elizabeth Windsor. Occasionally we get a glimpse of a
private feeling -- as in the shot of her, aghast, inspecting the
damage caused by the disastrous fire at Windsor Castle in 1992
(her “annus horribilis”).

Freud’s Matriarch

Freud encountered a forceful matriarch in his oil of 2001.
Even his Queen wears a crown.

When she first came to the throne she was presented in a
fashion essentially unchanged since the 18th century. In Cecil
Beaton’s photographic portraits from the early 1950s she was
depicted -- with crown and scepter or wearing the robes of the
Order of the Garter -- exactly like her Hanoverian ancestors.

The first of two oil paintings of her by Pietro Annigoni,
“Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Regent” (1954-55) is a handmade
version of those Beaton photographs: an antiquated dynastic
portrait with a dash of added romantic wistfulness.

By the time Annigoni had a second go at the Queen in 1959,
his take on her had become odd. The result was bizarre and
slightly surreal: part dressmaker’s dummy, part Egyptian mummy.
Perhaps by 1969, not even such a dab-hand at official
portraiture as Annigoni was quite sure how to represent a ruling
monarch any more.

Lichfield’s Celeb

Numerous efforts were made around that time to update the
image of the Queen. Photographers such as Eve Arnold and Patrick
Lichfield began to snap her more as a celeb than a sovereign.

Was this new, informal likeness any truer? In retrospect,
their cheerily grinning Queen seems to have been made over in
the manner of a 1960s movie star.

It must be exhausting, being famous -- let alone ruling --
for all this time.

In Chris Levine’s photograph “Lightness of Being” (2007),
the Queen wears a crown and furred robes and her eyes are
closed: an exhausted withdrawal into inner space. Snoozing or
not, she is clearly a doughty survivor, as Freud’s portrait more
than hints.

The latest photographic image, by the German artist Thomas
Struth, shows her posed with the Duke of Edinburgh at Windsor
Castle on a two-seater chair, half throne, half sofa. They look
formidable and also strangely normal. Amid all that pomp, they
could be the nation’s granny and grandpa.

“The Queen: Art and Image” is at the National Portrait
Gallery, 2 St. Martin’s Place, London WC2H 0HE from today (May
17) through Oct. 21.